


And I Must Eat

by drainoctane



Category: Dark Souls (Video Games), Dark Souls III
Genre: Body Horror, Cannibalism, Horror, Other, Slime, Transformation, Vore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-10-25 02:09:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20716358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drainoctane/pseuds/drainoctane
Summary: This time, when Aldrich awoke, the mouth he had clearly put to use the night before was unreachable.  This gave him a moment’s worry, as his mouth was, in a way, the part of him to blame for the state of the rest of his decaying body.  But he calmed as he stirred from his sleep – the bodies and souls he’d conquered had blessed his form with innumerable thrilling variations, and this one would prove no less a blessing for its challenging nature.





	And I Must Eat

**Author's Note:**

> Pre-Lord of Cinder Aldrich. Gratuitous body horror, slime, people-eating, no dicks. Maybe canon-compliant, I tried, help

In his chamber in the Cathedral of the Deep, while pronouncements of sacred denial resonated through the halls, Aldrich, devourer of men, lay in a magnificent sprawl across the fouled floor and dreamed of newly opened wounds, and of a flickering fire.

This time, when Aldrich awoke, the mouth he had clearly put to use the night before was unreachable. This gave him a moment’s worry, as his mouth was, in a way, the part of him to blame for the state of the rest of his decaying body. But he calmed as he stirred from his sleep – the bodies and souls he’d conquered had blessed his form with innumerable thrilling variations, and this one would prove no less a blessing for its challenging nature.

He turned over, and felt that his body was heavy, and that it spread out against the stone floor as gravity moved it. That was familiar to him, though gravity dispersed him more and more with each passing day. The echoing, liquid complaint of his stomach, requesting more blood, more meat – that too was familiar, but had grown strange. He didn’t feel it a foot and a half away from the seat of his consciousness in any particular direction. He didn’t exactly hear it anymore, but felt it bubble up from within him and pang through his whole being.

Aldrich was calm. No force in the world could put an end to his devouring, let alone a trivial problem like the sudden lack of a mouth. This was the form his growing power had chosen for him, and over the months since it had revealed itself to him, he’d found the initial necessity of butchering the bodies of his sacrifices to be less and less relevant. The hands that had once gradually carved living meat from bone had turned formless, and the tight throat and narrow jaw, as recompense, were more readily opened to accommodate whole flesh. The larger bones he once discarded, he now found quite digestible. He no longer had to stalk prey on solid legs, in the guise of a man.

\--

The brothers and sisters of the Cathedral of the Deep had witnessed the slow change of his body into a shape directed by power beyond their reckoning. Many regarded the man-eating cleric warily – rightly, perhaps – as a creature obviously polluted by the Deep. Some saw for themselves the ease with which he drew power and pleasure from the flesh of man. In the early stages of his transformation, some who seemed fervent believers in the protection from corruption the Church sought to provide would bring sacrifices to Aldrich in secret and watch his indulgent rites in ecstatic terror.

It seemed only natural to Aldrich that the further he was drawn into his new role – the venerated object of this band of tainted devout, a saint of the Deep – the smaller the number of pure hearts in the chapel dwindled. He watched, for as long as he had eyes to see, as others changed in subtler ways. Their deviances were given direction by the slinking Deep over which they kept vigil, just as the similarly gluttonous, but nevertheless man-shaped Aldrich of Irithyll was changed overtly. Those who insisted that their place was not to assist Aldrich in his vile work quickly found themselves a part of it, screaming curses and heaving sobs as they slowly succumbed to the unknowable depths of his interior.

\--

Aldrich was no longer startled by the layer of slime and blood that polluted his chamber. He could recall the immediate shock of discovering that the skin of his legs had darkened, that his pores were weeping a thin layer of black slime. A few weeks on, he had been comparatively excited by the fact that, below his ponderous gut, the resting place of so many, his legs had undeniably begun to melt together.

Perhaps the change in perspective – no eyes, no frail human stomach to turn at the stench of rot – made the damp and filth feel comforting. He’d had his doubts that the Pontiff had sent him here out of any consideration for Aldrich’s ambitions. But given some of the deacons’ curiosity and even encouragement of his proclivities, paired with the Cathedral’s fascinating refashioning of his body, he was in no hurry to leave.

His voice was useless with no mouth to give it shape. He shifted the great black mass that had so recently been his bloated gut and distinct legs, and slithered tentatively through the castoff sludge, in hopes that the scraping of his displaced bones against the floor and the liquid noise of his motion would alert his faithful that he awaited feeding once again. If they didn’t, he would have to take advantage of the distracted deacons’ habit of leaving his door unlocked.

\--

It wasn’t long before the vibration of an opening door disturbed Aldrich’s pacing undulations, and a pair of hooded clerics entered, bearing between them a cage packed with writhing, groaning prey. Aldrich could feel the heat of their bodies on the currents of the air, and the cries of the more lucid among them rang against the chamber walls.

The clerics’ voices were soft, almost imperceptible above the anguish of the captured people. He no longer had ears to distinguish words, but the familiar timbre of their sound spoke of cautious awe and perverse excitement. Aldrich’s whole mass shuddered in anticipated relief. They rested the cage heavily on the ground and pulled the door shut behind them before unfastening the cage lock.

One of the sacrifices tumbled onto the floor, displacing the slime that stood there enough for Aldrich to determine the location of the disturbance. He drew up his trailing back half and lunged forward, momentarily airborne before he collided with his first course. With no mouth, he was at liberty to choose his prey’s point of entry – a boon, as he had suspected. He stayed where he had fallen, atop his victim’s hips, and parted his flesh to facilitate entry. The bones suspended in Aldrich’s mass, mostly his own, broken and molded to differ from their prior functions, grasped at cloth and wounded skin until there was no escaping him.

The sacrifice jerked and yelled, the salt of tears diffusing into the sludge below. Aldrich grasped him tighter, the churning of his bones beginning to tear his prey apart, and stretched his body out, reveling in the torturously prolonged final thrashings of the once-proud being. He could taste, still, in this monstrous form, and more deeply than he ever had with a man’s tongue. The richness of the captured flesh filled every part of him, and the blood seeped through, drunk greedily by every amorphous surface it touched. The clerics stood by patiently, taking turns corralling the remaining sacrifices and observing their saint’s indulgence.

His body moved at leisure around its prey. There were ten full minutes of hopeful, doomed fighting as Aldrich savored the act of devouring, already dreaming of the end of his feast. When he determined that the unfortunate soul was fixed enough within him, he directed another part of his body to seek out more meat. The clerics’ recognizable tread retreated from his grasp and held the cage door wide. A couple of sacrifices still lay within, wracked with helpless dread.

He slipped beneath both of them and coiled around them, letting the weight of their flesh-laden forms press them down into his softness until they felt the teeth of his bones pulling them in and lashed out uselessly against him. Their cries reverberated through Aldrich, who displayed his pleasure by flattening out beneath them, exposing more of his surface to the irresistible flavor of their living meat.

\--

Aldrich’s venerators stood by with practiced patience, letting nearly half an hour pass before the man-eater stirred again in search of more meat. They had been right to capture so many; this newest permutation of his hallowed form had roused in him the desire to use every inch of his sprawling inhumanity in service of gluttony. He was all mouth, all roiling stomach.

The pair split to collect the sacrifices who had found enough power in their tortured bodies to flee to the dark corners of the chamber. Three remained, and Aldrich was eager to ensnare each of them in ravenous flesh. He gurgled with the din of active digestion as he slithered across the floor, his fluids burrowing into the torn skin of his meals and destroying their delicate architecture as the life gradually ebbed from them. There was certainly enough space along his amorphous length to take in two more sacrifices, and his wild avarice would surely drive him to find room for the third as well.

So much of Aldrich was already engaged in digesting these wretched people. The sensation of their weight and density displacing him, the savagery of his interior’s churning – all this was pleasure to him, and the added weight and distraction hampered his effort to move in the direction of more prey.

The clerics perceived this, and he felt a jarring blow against him as another body slammed into his side and tried to pull free. The sacrifice’s head was pressed against him, sinking in on its own, and he reached out to cover its eyes and seep over its neck, allowing it to draw breath to prolong its struggle. It writhed mightily, and the devout, voices raised in their own fervor, grappled with its legs until its feet were fixed within him. Aldrich felt the fleeting taste of leather as one of the clerics surreptitiously made contact with his consecrated flesh. It lingered for a moment, and was withdrawn.

Aldrich’s attention was diverted by the first of the sacrifices, whose voice had faded from the cacophony. She was, Aldrich determined, female, based on his newfound knowledge of the parts of her he had subsumed. Her breathing was feeble, her soul detaching from her like old paint from a wall. His ichor mixed with her blood and flowed through her hollow places. The most captivating flavor overtook him – the last thrashes of life. His body shuddered and stilled. Aldrich held her guttering soul within him with the utmost care, and then violently doused it.

The debauched saint was senseless as he drank her power in. His fluids were disturbed by the movement of the clerics falling to their knees. He let the twisting of his tormented prey stir his body as it may, languorously grinding their flesh into his own.

Another limb made contact with him, seemingly unprompted, perhaps unwittingly. He tasted its skin and cloth before it jerked back in retreat, tearing free from his sucking surface. Aldrich lurched after it, his greed unwilling to allow escape. He landed on the unfortunate sacrifice with great force, and felt one of its bones shatter beneath him as its scream rang the walls of the chamber.

Part of him pressed against the leather and tarnished metal of a cleric’s boot. He kept still there, seizing the limbs of the sacrifice first. Six men was enough, but he would not reject a willing contribution to his grim banquet. Flesh stirred behind the garment and, after a tense span of seconds, withdrew. The cleric vocalized with turbulent emotion, and slunk back across the slick stone. Perhaps another time.

\--

Aldrich passed another small eternity, drawing his victims further in, strangling their lives from them. The broken body of the most recent sacrifice was quickly dead, and Aldrich reeled at the rapturous onslaught of another life melting into him. His form crept and ached around the tangled limbs as he traversed the floor in leisurely pursuit of the last of his adorers’ gifts. The clerics walked ahead, leading him with their gentle, shaking voices and the subtle vibration of their steps.

The sacrifice had fled the cage opportunistically, but the scent of death choked the air. Hours of internment with the devourer had reduced it to a shivering shade in the corner of the chamber, unable to quiet the cries of its brothers and sisters in captivity. It held its face, unmoving even as the saint drew close and reached out with a stolen arm.

The fingers of the dead man were numb to Aldrich, but he could move through the limb like blood and pull at its tendons, slowly closing its chilled hand around the wrist of the sacrifice, guiding it to him. A growl – grinding of bones, motion of semiliquid flesh – welled up from his depths, and the sacrifice shrank back further. Aldrich encroached upon its huddled body like a tide until it was entirely imprisoned within him.

He rested against the walls and spread out across the floor. The four live sacrifices writhed and twisted under the smothering mass of his body as it expanded and contracted with his breath. The gasping head of the last sacrifice fought its way to the surface. Aldrich felt a light pressure as one of the devout wiped its face clean, prolonging its suffering and Aldrich’s enjoyment.

The saint’s body was at its limit. He struggled to contain the four living and two dead that churned in his interior, but every moment of continued devouring was at the same time a moment of glorying in his own power, a confirmation of that which the clerics revered in secret. Aldrich flexed parts of himself to crush the dead meat within, and his bones ripped the flesh of the living.

\--

At length, he felt the fading will of the pair of beings that had tangled inextricably into each other as they cowered from him. They died within scant moments of one another, filling Aldrich’s senses with the burning of their souls. His mass roiled as he extinguished them together, driving new screams from those two who yet remained alive.

The upper section of one of the dead, disfigured by the convulsions of his body, slid through the gaps of Aldrich’s open ribs to fall to the wet stone floor, improvised teeth having split the sacrifice near in half. A living one sobbed madly, renewing its thrashing at the sight of the bisected corpse. Aldrich let it lay. With time, he would consume every scrap of their miserable bodies, and every drop of blood and splinter of bone would fuel him.

He perceived the quiet shifting of the clerics at his side, their breathing pushing soft currents of air over his fluid skin. They knelt, seeming to attend raptly to Aldrich’s slow digestion. Gouts of blood poured from wounded flesh, soaking readily into Aldrich’s ichor. Why had he fretted over the loss of one mouth? His body now so readily devoured and digested with all its surfaces – his gluttonous desire had empowered him so far beyond even his dreams.

Aldrich lazily manipulated his body, relishing the resistance and release of the sacrifices’ bones as they fractured and split under his pressure. One of the clerics flinched at every snap, causing subtle disturbances to the fluid in which they knelt. The living ones, fading with each passing minute, still weakly struggled against him, stretching and parting his formless flesh.

\--

The eventual deaths of the final sacrifices punctuated the saint’s gluttonous reverie with bursts of rapturous intensity. He curled around the fallen half-destroyed cadaver, cold from laying on the cathedral floor through the hours of his feeding, and added it to the meat that had yet to lose its structure to his churning deep. Though its character had changed with death, the flavor was nonetheless agreeable, and the density of it pleased him as it sank into his body.

Aldrich rose to occupy the center of his chamber, deliberately moving perilously near to his venerators, who scrambled to allow his passage. He found their terror almost more gratifying than their adoration. He would rest, he resolved, until more prey found its way to him. He would destroy these beings utterly, and grow more great and terrible with their strength until the whole Church revered him as they did the Deep itself.

The clerics rose unsteadily to their feet and heaved the empty cage over their shoulders, carefully closing his door as they departed. The only sound in the chamber was his own body, groaning and turbulent, wreaking its inexorable destruction.


End file.
